Pure joy - Mississippi river system map

This is the best thing I’ve seen in ages: a London Underground style map of the complex of rivers that make up the Mississippi system, or basin. Now I want to do others for the Nile, the Amazon and the Mekong. The original author has limited himself, so far, to North America. Like many really great ideas, it’s obvious in retrospect. Frank Jacobs’ text is well worth reading, too:

Rivers both connect and divide. Not just the sublunar and the supernatural, also the real and the real. They’re mankind’s first highways, linking up all points on either shore along the navigable stretch between estuary and source. But rivers are also nature’s ready-made borders, seized upon by surveyors and mapmakers as obvious dividing markers for the land they irrigate.

I wonder if I could produce a London Underground map for the VOC’s trade network, or an Underground-style time map, for Napoleon’s campaigns (with apologies to Minard) or the 30 years’ war, where one battle leads to another.

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